Bamboo Façade at the Frankfurter Kunstverein | Artist Joko Avianto

Bamboo Façade

‘Roots. Indonesian Contemporary Art’ is an exhibition held at the German museum Frankfurter Kunstverein. Simply a journey into the world of bamboo and its qualities, a two-part guided tour through the bamboo installation at the main entrance and into the bamboo grove at the Palmengarten.

A rusty looking installation saying all about Indonesian and Asian culture located at the main entrance, over a 3 weeks working period and 1,500 bamboo sticks of raw material the artist Joko Avianto created a semi-enclosed space to make an introduction to the exhibition inside. He calls it ‘Pohon Besar’ which means big trees, the best attributive for his work.
Six meter long elements of the natural material nested into each other, made a great visual addition to the exhibition as you walk under you see all these elements in its natural form interlacing in steady strokes, dry, segmented, nearly splintered elements over & on both sides of your head creates a medium from the exhibition its self.

You can’t help but to love that strong, rusty, natural, complicated look in a dead industrial looking environment. Sure it wasn’t a great addition to the architecture of the building since it looks like a separate shape, but it was the artist vision to create without interfering with the existing building. He aimed to create a big tree at the entrance for its great cultural meaning since the tree is a place to meet, interact. The installation is a great abstract of a tree, it says a tree without ‘literally’ seeing a tree wonderful work by Joko Avianto.